When I’m asked the nutshell/elevator pitch version of my approach to design, I typically respond with something about “streamlined interfaces that make effective use of color and whitespace, with an emphasis on excellent typography.”
All of these are important aspects of good design, but in reality, there are much more important considerations under the hood – the parts of the process that ultimately determine whether a team has truly and effectively solved the business challenge at hand through their work.
Better Understanding Through Research
Addressing any user experience question should begin with a research phase. UX team members cannot effectively solve a design or interaction problem that they do not understand.
How a UX team comes to understand the challenge at hand can vary from project to project. It can include anything from audits of an existing app or service to user surveys, user and stakeholder inter – views, deep dives in metrics and analytics, observational research, audits of competing services, and more.
Each of these pieces serves to fill in part of the puzzle; the more avenues of research a team can pursue, the better understanding they’ll have of the challenges ahead.
Content-Driven Design
This is an important lesson I’ve learned, but one that I still see many experienced designers miss. Design is a means of communication, a way to establish a connection between a user and a product.
Design should be informed (and largely driven) by the content that needs to be communicated. Whether that’s finding the best way to accommodate long-form editorial content or the most effective method for communicating in-app notifications, design should follow content. Too often it’s the other way around – designers work away from writers and strategists, come back to present their grand design vision, and the latter team members are left with the task of reshaping content to fit that design.
Collaboration and Communication
The best product design work is not generated by singular star designers, but by deeply collaborative efforts that bring together representatives of multiple disciplines. Researchers, content strategists, interaction designers, prototypers, and engineers are all invaluable contributors to a world-class user experience. The collective efforts of a multi-disciplinary team working together is much more likely to successfully improve a problematic interaction or elevate a user experience than any single individual designer (no matter how talented) could.
The best product design work is not generated by singular star designers, but by deeply collaborative efforts that bring together representatives of multiple disciplines.
Effective communication amongst team members and between teams is also imperative. One of the best parts of working at both Textio and Black Pixel was the tight-knit communication between different teams on a project. Design and engineering leads on a project communicate daily, and each team informs the decisions of the other through a tight, rapid feedback loop. This allows engineers to regularly weigh in on implementation impacts of potential design directions, and our designers are able to adjust mid-stream to make necessary accommodations to a concept.
The design/engineering relationship is a dialogue, never just one team throwing designs or requirements over the fence for the other to deal with.
Playing to Strengths
One of the most important lessons I learned early on as a team leader is to match particular team members to challenges based on their strengths. At Black Pixel, our team consisted of broadly skilled senior designers, but each has a particular specialization (visual design, prototyping, typography, iconography).
Matching the right person to each task improves the odds of success and raises the overall level of quality of work that the team can collectively produce.
Test, Revise, and Test Again
Of course all the effective process in the world is useless if the design solution doesn’t actually address the problem at hand. Whenever possibe, I push for testing throughout the design process (not just at the conclusion). Something as low-fi as getting a paper prototype in front of users or a stakeholder can greatly inform the process, and also highlight shortcomings of a proposed solution.
From paper prototypes to click-throughs, to beta testing and beyond, the testing and revision process can and should inform design throughout the life of a product.